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THE annual Canadian Front festival is headed to the Museum of Modern Art, bringing with it 10 films made by our northern neighbors. The festival kicks off Wednesday and runs through March 23.

I’m most looking forward to “Pontypool,” a thriller by maverick director Bruce McDonald, who should be as well known as Canada’s David Cronenberg is, but isn’t.

I’ve admired McDonald’s work since I saw his “Highway 61” in 1991. (Any movie that sticks in your head for nearly two decades has to be something.)

In it, a small-town barber and a young woman strap a corpse to the top of their car and take a journey from Canada to the US.

Last year, I was turned on by McDonald’s “The Tracey Fragments,” featuring a pre-“Juno” Ellen Page as a distressed young woman who spends a large part of the movie wrapped in a shower curtain.

As for “Pontypool,” MoMA describes it as “a taut, smart chamber horror story in which a virus, spread by language, turns listeners into flesh-eating zombies. The action takes place in a radio station [in Ontario] whose broadcasts may be a big part of the problem.”

The cast includes character actor Stephen McHattie, who plays the older Nite Owl in “Watchmen.”

When “Pontypool” opened in Canada this month, critic Peter Howell of the Toronto Star gave it three out of a possible high of four stars, and called it “frequently terrifying.”

Go to moma.org for the festival schedule. The program was organized by Laurence Kardish, MoMA’s (Canadian-born) senior film curator.

* Gerard Depardieu has always been a burly sort, but this is ridiculous.

In Claude Chabrol’s “Bellamy,” part of Lincoln Center’s “Rendez-vous With French Cinema” (the series ends today), the 60-year-old actor is starting to look the way Marlon Brando did in his later years.

Perhaps the extra pounds have to do with the pneumonia death last year of Depardieu’s actor-son, Guillaume, at just 37.

While the French were in town, I had lunch with Nora Arnezeder, the 19-year-old star of Christophe Barratier’s “Paris 36” (opening here April 3). Luncheon details to come.